Charity Under Fire

Many relief groups are leaving Iraq as violence against aid workers escalates, but a few quietly press on

The relief group CHF, in Silver Spring, Md., operates one of Iraq’s biggest microfinance programs, providing small loans to help people

start or improve their businesses, as well as directing a major project to help rebuild schools and other facilities.

The group employs more than 400 people in the war-ravaged country, but it makes a deliberate effort to keep a low profile. On its Web site, for example, the group features news about its activities in places such as Colombia, India, and Mongolia, but has not one word about Iraq. Many other charities are taking a similarly under-the-radar approach, barely noting their presence in Iraq in appeals to donors or other communications.

“We have purposely not emphasized our work in Iraq,” says Judith A. Hermanson, senior vice president of CHF. “It’s not that we hide it. But we’re not putting it out there as the flagship of what we’re doing.” The reason, she says, is that “we don’t want it to be a target, for the security of our staff.”

As the third anniversary of the American-led invasion of Iraq approaches, the violence is raging so furiously that CHF and many other humanitarian groups are growing ever more concerned about the risks of operating in the country. And some humanitarian experts say the toll in Iraq may be symptomatic of a new era in which deep political strife around the world puts the lives of relief workers in more peril than ever before.

An exodus of aid workers over the past two-and-a-half years has already left many Iraqis without vital assistance. By some estimates, as many as 50 employees of humanitarian groups have lost their lives since the war started, and each death causes charities to rethink how long they can operate in such a dangerous atmosphere. Among the American groups that have pulled up their stakes in the past two years are CARE, whose Baghdad chief was kidnapped and murdered, Catholic Relief Services, the International Rescue Committee, Oxfam America, and World Vision. Save the Children, one of the only big groups that was still operating in Iraq, closed its operations at the beginning of this month.

Shrinking Coalition

As American groups have pulled out, so too have charities from other countries. A coalition of charities — the NGO Coordinating Committee in Iraq — says its membership has shrunk from a high of about 300 international relief organizations in 2003 to about 80 now. Kasra Mofarah, executive coordinator of the committee, who works out of Baghdad and Amman, Jordan, says about 40 percent to 50 percent of the aid groups remaining in Iraq are European, mostly Italian; about 30 percent are North American; and most of the rest are Asian.

Still, some small American groups are pressing ahead, regardless of the growing hazards.

“It’s the scariest place we’ve ever worked in,” says Zainab Salbi, an Iraqi woman who heads Women for Women International, in Washington, a group that provides money, job training, and small loans to women in war zones.

“And I’ve worked in besieged Sarajevo, in the middle of the war in Kosovo, and fighting in Congo, where we had staff that barely escaped rebel attack,” she says.

Indeed, workers for nonprofit groups in Iraq have suffered a litany of horrors:

• Suicide bombers in October 2003 attacked the Baghdad headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross — a leading humanitarian agency known for its neutrality — killing 12 people.

• Four missionaries for the Southern Baptist Convention International Mission Board, in Richmond, Va., were killed when their car was attacked with automatic weapons and grenades in Mosul in March 2004.

• Fadi Fadel, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who worked for the International Rescue Committee in southern Iraq, was kidnapped by a local militia and released in April 2004.

• The head of World Vision’s Iraq program, Mohammed Hushiar, was shot dead in a restaurant in Mosul in September 2004.

• Margaret Hassan, head of CARE International’s Baghdad office, was kidnapped in fall 2004 and murdered — after being videotaped asking Britain to withdraw its troops from Iraq. Ms. Hassan, 59, seemed an unlikely target: While Irish-born, she was married to an Iraqi man, held Iraqi citizenship, and had worked in the country for decades.

• Marla Ruzicka, who founded the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, in Washington, and an Iraqi colleague, Faiz Ali Salim, were killed in a car bombing in Baghdad in April 2005.

• Four human-rights workers affliated with the Christian Peacemaker Teams, in Chicago, were kidnapped in November 2005 in Baghdad and still remain missing.

While humanitarian-aid work is inherently risky, relief groups stepped into an especially volatile environment in Iraq. Because the United Nations imposed sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s government after it invaded Kuwait in 1990, few Western charities were present before the United States invaded.

“We were showing up with an armed invasion at the same time, having to introduce ourselves while delivering services in a conflict situation with a population that didn’t know our intentions because we weren’t there [earlier] to show them,” says Nathaniel Raymond, communications adviser for humanitarian response at Oxfam America.

“No matter how you slice it, Western aid workers are linked in the local population’s mind with coalition forces,” says Charles Rogers, director of corporate security for World Vision.

The incidents in Iraq, however, are also part of a broader pattern of increasing violence against aid workers worldwide, which Mr. Rogers attributes to the emergence of new, local “power brokers,” such as tribal leaders and warlords, in the post-cold-war era.

He and other aid workers say that governments also need to do more to distinguish humanitarian aid from military activities, criticizing the United States for announcing before the Iraq invasion that the Pentagon, rather than the State Department, would oversee relief activities in Iraq.

Government Money

Some groups went further and criticized the military action itself — including Church World Service, in New York, a Christian relief organization, which announced it would not accept federal money for aid projects in Iraq and raised more than $1-million on its own.

Working with the Middle East Council of Churches, Church World Service has shipped school supplies, food, blankets, and other goods to Iraq and provided training and grants to seven local Iraqi charities. Activities are supervised by an American who now works mostly from Amman, Jordan, because of security concerns, says Jan Dragin, a spokeswoman for the group.

Church World Service, the Mennonite Central Committee, and several other religious and humanitarian groups started a project called All Our Children, which spent more than $2-million in cash and donated medicine and other items through March 2005 to provide health services to Iraqi children and pay for a traveling theater project.

Another group that has opposed the war, Veterans for Peace, in St. Louis, faced an internal rupture when it decided to continue its humanitarian work in Iraq. The group started the Iraq Water Project in 1999 to hire local workers to repair water-treatment plants in Iraq. But the project’s co-founder, Fredy Champagne, a disabled Vietnam veteran who lives in Garberville, Calif., resigned from the project once the United States invaded.

“We created it for a very specific objective, to take veterans back to the war zone for healing purposes, but also to show the world and the country we should be rebuilding the country instead of having sanctions against them,” says Mr. Champagne, a retired process server. Once the war started, he says, “you’re helping the American government, no matter what you say.”

Art Dorland, of East Cleveland, Ohio, a church custodian who is also a Vietnam veteran and chairman of the project, looks at it differently. “I’ve always felt we made this commitment to the people of Iraq to help with these plants,” he says, “and you just can’t cut them off.”

Local Workers

The veterans group, which has repaired six water plants in Iraq, no longer sends delegations there for fear of endangering local workers. It sends money for water projects to Life for Relief and Development, an Arab-American charity in Southfield, Mich.

Life for Relief and Development has an active presence in Iraq, with 40 to 50 local employees and offices in Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul.

The group has rehabilitated schools in partnership with Unicef, distributed wheelchairs, rebuilt houses that were destroyed during a battle in Basra, and provided food, clothing, and medical supplies to Fallujah. It dispenses medical supplies that are donated to AmeriCares, a relief group in Stamford, Conn.

But working in Iraq is a challenge, says Mohammed Alomari, deputy director of programs for Life for Relief and Development.

The charity’s office in Fallujah was destroyed during heavy fighting there in November 2004. The group received death threats after workers picked up some medical supplies that were mistakenly shipped to a U.S. military base in Fallujah. And the U.S. military seized computers from the organization’s Baghdad office in 2004, but returned them five days later.

“We have to remain low-key and try not to attract too much attention,” Mr. Alomari says. “We try to not be associated with any political type of group. Now we can’t even keep a sign in front of the office.”

When Life for Relief and Development transports medical goods, it works with the Iraqi Red Crescent and local medical groups, joins convoys with other humanitarian organizations, and displays a banner on its truck identifying the goods as medical supplies, he adds.

Other groups have faced similar obstacles. CHF International has moved its offices several times because of death threats, says Bruce Parmelee, the group’s director of global operations in Africa and the Middle East.

One of the office moves came after a security firm that CHF was considering hiring came to assess the premises and behaved “militaristically,” sporting guns and blocking off both ends of the street.

CHF now has its own security manager who trains employees and the group keeps a low profile.

“We don’t have signs, we’re not conspicuous,” Mr. Parmelee says. “We don’t ride around in white SUV’s. We vary our travel times, we vary our schedules.”

The groups that left Iraq say they felt they had no choice. But the decision was sometimes painful.

Catholic Relief Services left Iraq in March 2004 because it worried about the safety of its employees and could no longer monitor its projects to ensure they were operating well, says Sean Callahan, vice president for overseas operations.

“It was getting more and more obvious to us [that it was time to leave], which to be honest with you doesn’t make it any easier,” he says.

He adds: “We pride ourselves on our solidarity with the local populace.”

However, the group was working with a local Catholic relief affiliate, Caritas Iraq, that it knew would continue to help Iraqis, Mr. Callahan says. Catholic Relief Services is giving Caritas the unspent money that it raised for Iraq — about $1-million, he says.

The nonprofit organizations that have decided to stay say that despite the security and logistical challenges, they are reluctant to abandon Iraqis who need help.

Carrying On

The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict is still reeling from the death of its founder, Ms. Ruzicka, but it is gearing up to continue her work.

The charity named an executive director, Sarah Holewinski, in January. She says Ms. Ruzicka told friends and colleagues before she died that she wanted the group to carry on if anything happened to her.

“The mourning period was very long,” says Ms. Holewinski. “People just adored Marla. It was so sudden.”

But now, with money from the Open Society Institute, in New York, and other private donors, it is again helping civilian victims of war in Iraq and Afghanistan get medical treatment and compensation — including working with the U.S. government to distribute money from the Marla Ruzicka Iraqi War Victims Fund, established by Congress in 2003.

“There is tremendous humanitarian need in Iraq, much of it in areas we feel secure operating in,” says Jeremy Barnicle, communications director for Mercy Corps, in an e-mail message. “We balance the value of those services we provide against the risks associated with delivering those services. We are constantly assessing and reassessing that balance.”

Mercy Corps, in Portland, and CHF International both receive money from the U.S. Agency for International Development for a three-year project the agency developed, the Iraq Community Action Program.

With a budget of more than $250-million, it helps Iraqis form local associations that make decisions democratically about projects to improve facilities such as schools, roads, and water systems. The U.S. agency says its five nonprofit grantees have established more than 1,300 associations and completed more than 3,500 projects.

Slow Progress

Fund-raising concerns loom large for many of the relief and development charities in Iraq, particularly as money promised for immediate aid right after the invasion starts to run out and new sources of funds have yet to emerge.

Wasseem S. Kabbara — a Lebanese-American entrepreneur in Boston who started the Freedom and Peace Trust to provide medical supplies to treat post-traumatic stress and other psychiatric ailments suffered by people in Iraq — feels so strongly about his mission that he says he has been paying the charity’s expenses out of his own pocket for the past six months.

Mr. Kabbara says he started the relief organization after viewing scenes on television of Iraqis looting shortly after the U.S. invasion.

While others saw lawlessness in the images, he says he saw people trying to relieve the pain of living under Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship.

“I immediately knew they are all suffering because of exposure to torture, exposure to oppression,” Mr. Kabbara recalls. “All of a sudden the country is liberated and they had access to things they never had access to before.”

Working with Direct Relief International, in Santa Barbara, Calif., Freedom and Peace Trust has shipped $20-million worth of donated medications to hospitals and clinics in Iraq, sometimes with the help of the coalition forces, Mr. Kabbara says.

While it continues to ship goods to Iraq, via Kuwait, it closed its Baghdad office a year ago, after the two Iraqi psychologists working there said it was too dangerous to continue, he says.

Vast Needs

As violent strife continues in Iraq, disrupting basic services and causing tens of thousands of casualties, some aid groups worry about the humanitarian needs that are not being met.

Mr. Mofarah, of the NGO Coordinating Committee in Iraq, says that while many international relief groups left the country after violent episodes, now some are leaving because they can’t find “neutral” sources of funds — that is, not from the United States or other coalition countries. “The emergency donors are leaving the country,” he says.

For example, he notes that the European Union still provides money for reconstruction projects, but its aid arm, the European Community Humanitarian Aid Office, no longer pays for projects in Iraq.

“It’s very difficult to get any private funding for Iraq given the political aspects of the conflict,” says Silja Paasilinna, a senior program officer for Relief International, in Los Angeles, which is about to start a small-loans program in Iraq with money from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Yet Mr. Alomari, of Life, says conditions for the Iraqi people have not improved since the group started working in Iraq in the mid-1990s. “We’ve been seeing the suffering over the last 10 years or so,” he says. “It’s changed, but it hasn’t really improved greatly. There’s still massive malnutrition, still lack of good medical services, lack of good drinking water, good sanitation. These things are still a major problem. They haven’t really gone away.”